From elementary school through my first decade or so as a sportswriter, I watched John Wooden and his UCLA Bruins for 27 seasons. And I always marveled at how the gentle, professorial husband, father and grandfather could also be a competitor so fierce that a warrior was tame by comparison.

Here was this poetry-spouting ex-English teacher who would turn before each game, grin at his wife, Nell, and give her a wink – a tradition that started when he played for Martinsville High in Indiana and she played trumpet in the band.

(A boyhood friend said of Wooden: “He always had time for basketball, baseball and Nellie Riley.” Nell’s death in 1985, at age 73, left him despondent and lethargic for several years.)

But after the wink, he would turn back and rivet his attention on the floor, sparing no one – not his players, not the opposing players, certainly not the referees – in his drive to win.

He was an idol to many long before he won his first NCAA championship 16 years into his UCLA tenure. I grew up in West L.A. when a “Johnny Wooden” haircut (shaved sides, flat top) was cool and there was no better place to get one than at the Blue ‘n’ Gold barbershop in Westwood (slogan: “We’ve been trimming Bruins for over 40 years”).

Early on, his players discovered that the fierce side of Wooden was all the more effective because the glares or the remonstrations came from a father figure who behaved most of the time like a minister.

“Wooden can really rip you,” said one of his All-Americans, Gail Goodrich (Poly of Sun Valley). “You’ve never been ripped until he’s ripped you.”

He never swore, though. Rival coaches have sworn they’ve heard him curse officials, but I’ve sat near the UCLA bench many times and never heard a curse word.

“Of course,” admitted Wooden, “I have told referees that I couldn’t tell their tops from their bottoms, which is almost as bad as swearing.”

Jim Powers, who played for Wooden at Central High in South Bend, Ind., and Indiana State, remembered, “John’s worst expression was something like, `My goodness gracious,’ but I remember one time we had an official named Fink and he hollered, `Fink, you stink.’ I think that excited us more than the game.”

“I needle in a soft-sell way,” Wooden said. “I don’t believe you’ll ever find an official who’ll say I jumped him after a game.”

Wooden was also not above riding opposing players. For instance, in 1964, at Berkeley, he yelled at Cal’s captain, “Quit crying and let the officials officiate the game.”

“He has an antiseptic needle – clean but biting – and it hurts,” said ex-All-American guard Walt Hazzard. “I’ve seen opposing players left shaking their heads at these needles, but there was nothing they could say.”

Psychology was used on opponents as well as refs. Before Pauley Pavilion was built, UCLA for years played home games in the Men’s Gym, so hot and clammy when filled with fans that it was nicknamed the “B.O. Barn.”

Wooden was accused of having the heat turned up to make things tough on opponents, which he denied.

“I wanted them to dislike coming in to play,” he said with a grin. “The more they felt that they couldn’t win there, the less likely they were going to win there.”

What, besides psyching, made him a great coach? In a statement to the New York Times in 1970, Wooden capsulized his coaching philosophy: “I got it from my own coach at Purdue, a wonderful man named `Piggy’ Lambert. It consists of three things and three alone: Get them in the best of condition so they won’t fold in the second half, teach them the fundamentals and get them to play together.”

Yes, as every coach does, he preached teamwork. But as every coach doesn’t, he imposed it on his players. He was a great admirer of Pete Maravich, the high-scoring LSU star, but if “Pistol Pete” had gone to UCLA, he would have been partially disarmed – “I’d never want a player (of mine) to lead the nation in scoring,” Wooden said.

“I think that when I had (Lew) Alcindor, for example, I’m confident that if I’d wanted to – and I talked to him about this one time: `I could work out our offense so that you could average 50 points a game and break all the records, but we certainly wouldn’t win championships. But with a team game, we have a great chance, with you, of winning the NCAA.’

“Of course, Lew, being that type of person, that’s the only way he would want it.”

At the start of every season, Wooden actually taught his players how to put on their socks properly in order to avoid blisters.

Locker rooms or practice facilities had to be left the way they were found – or cleaner. At his basketball camp in Thousand Oaks one summer, I saw the greatest coach who ever lived get a paper towel from the men’s room and remove two pieces of bubble gum from the gym water fountain.

He had all his past practices outlined on index cards.

He wanted UCLA uniforms to have two symmetrical numbers – 55 or 44 or 32. “A 3 and a 1 look off-balance,” he told me once, “and I like balance.”

No ice in the pregame-meal water (when he was a pro, Goodrich said, “Today, I don’t have ice water before a game. Why? I don’t know. Wooden said so. I believe him.”)

But Wooden the perfectionist was usually willing to forgive transgressions. One of his favorite sayings was, “I would rather go too far with a boy than not far enough.” Some of his favorite players were headaches to him (“high-spirited but not temperamental,” he described them).

Jerry Norman, one of his early players at UCLA, was kicked off the team for whispering during a chalk talk. Wooden eventually let him back on the team and he later was Wooden’s assistant coach and ace recruiter.

Wooden loved to use adages and little poems to make points:

“Be quick but don’t hurry.”

“Perfection is a goal we cannot attain, but we should always work toward it.”

“The worst athlete is the ineligible athlete.”

His players often laughed behind his back at these cornball, Midwestern-values homilies, but many of those young cynics used them on their own children or, if they became coaches, on their own players.

And Wooden the perfectionist also had a sense of humor.

He loved to tease his players, his children, his grandchildren. Even his athletic director.

J.D. Morgan, AD at UCLA for the basketball glory years, was ill and could not be at Kansas City when UCLA won its first NCAA basketball title. At a party later at Morgan’s house, Wooden asked for quiet so he could make a presentation.

He gave a long, serious speech, then presented his boss with “this token of our appreciation.”

“I opened up this package and it was a tieclip from the Holiday Basketball Classic,” said Morgan, who died in 1980. “I had half a dozen of them in my desk drawer. And he roared and pulled out from behind the couch another box, and that was the NCAA championship watch.”

Wooden was called “The Wizard of Westwood,” but he insisted he was no wizard.

He was described in terms that implied perfection – and was called “Saint John” by some detractors – but, Christian that he was, he insisted that only one man who ever lived was perfect.

However, when he was called coach or teacher, he was pleased and proud.

He had a master’s degree in education from Indiana State and a lifetime high school English teacher’s license in his home state. Perhaps, then, the first three lines from a favorite poem of Wooden’s (written by Glennice L. Harmon) should be part of his epitaph:

“They ask me why I teach,

And I reply,

Where could I find more splendid company?”

I don’t believe in heaven, but John Robert Wooden did. If he’s right, we can be sure he’s going to greet Nell with a wink.